And when you are done looking at this site for the Scots input on football world-wide, here are two more. 

For those who literally want to trace on the ground the local development of Scots and Scottish football in our own and other countries there is the newly available and ever-expanding site of:

The Scots Football Historians' Group


And on Scottish sports history in general but inevitably including fitba', see Andy Mitchell's inestimable:

Scottish Sport History   






Argentine Spread
The story of the apparently all-embracing spread of football in Argentina, by which, at that time, meant in its first first and second cities, Buenos Aires and Rosario, is in reality that of population growth. Simply put, in 1890 the population of Argentina as a whole was about 4 million. By 1914 it had doubled, including the arrival of about 600,000 Spanish and a million Italians. In that same period the number of inhabitants of Buenos Aires itself, so not including Greater Buenos Aires outwith, had tripled from half to one and a half million and Rosario, or rather Sante Fe province, in which it is to be found, from just under 400,000 to just under 900,000. 

Moreover, although in Argentina that same spread is made out to be the taking-over of the sport by the "criollos", the "native" population, from the English establishment, it was actually through the gradual adoption by very largely non-playing newcomers of what was to-an-extent an established game. Rugby was also played. Furthermore, whilst the truth is that, although the footballing establishment, the association football establishment, might have have been British, it was never Ingles. In fact it was largely Scots. Additionally, the "natives" were not truly native at all. They were not "indios", Indians, but another, later wave of European immigrants., this time predominantly from Southern Europe, where football had hardly really started and which thus had not learned the game in the home countries but did so in the newly adopted one and from those who were playing already. The Scots wave had begun to arrive from the 1820s, picking up after 1850, football starting in Scotland in 1872 and on an ad hoc basis in Argentina from about 1885, with the "criollo" wave only really commencing from 1900 and its football only really starting a decade later once they had got the hang of it and from those already in the know. 

But, moving on from populations to the beautiful game itself, its organised Argentine beginning was in 1891 with the formation of a first League of six clubs, all British, largely Buenos Aires-based but including the Buenos Aires and Rosario railway with its base and also the club's home at intermediate Campana, fifty miles north. And the clubs from the capital were noticeably in a circle to the north, south and west around what were then the city limits and are now those of the Federal District.   


And even in the League's second iteration from 1893 that remained largely true with the city expanding initially southward and around the still British-owned railway-yards that were built to serve in the opening up of the lands in the interior to the south and south-west. And this was whilst in Rosario two major clubs were to be formed, one, Rosario Central, that of the railway opening up the north of the country and with again Scots to the forefront.     

And it would still be these same clubs, which would largely carry the game into the 20th Century as the English High School team of Alex Watson Hutton, the again Scot seen in Argentina as the father of the game there, matured into the Alumni club which, replacing five seasons of Lomas success, albeit in leagues of as few as four teams, would more or less rule the roost for the first decade. In fact, only from 1903 did league's size start to increase with in 1904 Estudiantes de Buenos Aires becoming the first non-British team to compete.        

In part the development had been fed from as early 1899 when a second division mainly of reserve teams had been introduced with crucially a third of junior clubs, but both non-British and rapidly improving, added the following year. And it was they which began to feed through as in 1905 the top division was expanded to seven and in 1906 that number further increased to eleven with the sub-dividing of them, for one season only, into two groups and an end-of-season play-off that was still won by Alumni.


And it is from that point the top division was then held at nine or ten clubs and there was relegation/promotion but with clearly pressure from below. Indeed in 1912 frustrations even resulted in the creation of a rival, all "crillo" league, a situation that continued to 1915 by when British teams, with Banfield continuing albeit only in name to this day, had fallen permanently by the wayside, notably as many young, British-Argentinians returned to Europe to fight in the Great War.

But it is interesting where these latest teams were to be found. The new immigrants were now settling very much along the shore of the basin of the River Plate still but not to the south but the north of old Buenos Aires. By 1915 of the top-flight of twenty-five only three, perhaps just four, plus one from La Plata were south of the Federal District, seven were still within it but the remainder had sprung up in the various, new-immigrant barrios of the era between there and Tigre, twenty miles to the north.     


However, it was to prove a temporary phenomenon. Today, of the twenty-eight teams in the country's top echelon seven are in Buenos Aires itself, two more remain to the north but still in Greater BA as are five of the six now to the south. Which leaves two in Rosario, Central and Newell Old Boys, with eleven more scattered across the country to the Chilean border, albeit only its more populated north. Just now you'll look in vain for a Patagonian representative. See 2023..

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